Turned Around in Time
by Night Hawk 97
Summary: Time is strange. A greater understanding of the concept only illuminates how much we don't know. In everyday life it doesn't matter, as we're stuck in that dimension with no access to our past or future. Well, most of us. Like anything in Harry's life, the role time plays is... complicated. An attempt to blend the entire Marvel cinematic universe.
1. Interim

_Definition: Interim_

 _(Adjective) Having temporary effect_

 _serving as a temporary measure until something more complete and permanent can be established_

 _(Noun) A period of time between two occurrences or periods_

…

Harry Potter first came to the world at a specific coordinate in space-time. He entered England and 1980, and, not insignificantly, a prophecy that was to rule his life for the next seventeen years.

Had things been different, he may have grown up reading comics, watching _Back to the Future_ or _Doctor Who_. But science fiction was a strange quirk of normal boys, and while it was grudgingly permissible for Dudley, Harry was deemed so far past critically abnormal that the Dursleys feared it might be the tipping point.

Harry hardly caught a glimpse, but he enjoyed those fragments immensely. He read some _Batman_ , a little _Superman_ , and saw the stories that tended to stick around the longest, but not much else.

Unlike other children of the 80s, Harry's childhood was void of science fiction. His teenage years compensated for this by being filled with magic, and in these years he never really thought about fanciful things like time travel or alien races, even though by thirteen he'd had more personal experience in that department than most people.

It only became apparent much later, but when he saved himself with his patronus, the most important things were summarised in one exchange: "I knew I could do it this time because I'd already done it … does that make sense?"

Though he didn't recognise it, in that moment, Harry attested to the inflexibility of time – he was saved by his spell, so he had to go back in time to cast it, because it had already happened. For a short length of time, he had already cast and was going to cast the lifesaving spell. So before and after… well, they're flexible. Dependent on one's point of reference, really. But events? Not so much.

"I don't know," Hermione had patently admitted she had no idea, and so captured the essence of just how mindboggling the whole concept is.

But the weird day passed without much acknowledgement and Harry never really contemplated it again.

Perhaps due to his fantasy-devoid formative years, Harry didn't deal in hypotheticals, in the innumerable _what if_ s. He dealt with the present, and he thought on the future. To him, the past was for irrefutable things and hints of what would come back to bite him later. It was less important than what was to come, wherein the actual effort not to die would take place.

Indeed, he thought about death far more often than any child should. It surrounded him in first his parents, then his godfather, his friends, and countless strangers. He faced it, year after year, wondering if _this time_ he would catch it. Then he marched to it with open arms, the dead by his side.

And he came back.

With him were three souvenirs. The Deathly Hallows were thought to be no more than a story. Of course, personal experience discounted that theory. He united them.

Some believed that the three brothers had created the items, or maybe simply found them. Few believed that they were gifted by Death itself. Harry subscribed to the same doubt. Despite the proof of magic, he'd still come from a background with little patience for the blatantly fanciful. Harry preferred things he could see for himself.

Regardless, the story had a name for the one person who was the master of the Elder Wand, the Cloak of Invisibility, and the Resurrection Stone; the Master of Death.

And he let it all go.

He graduated with Hermione. He followed Ron into the Auror corps. He embraced anonymity when the fervour of his victory died down. He left Ginny when she couldn't accept that. He forgave Mrs Weasley for the howler.

He didn't dwell on the Hallows; they seemed to have played such a small part in events, despite their alleged power.

He later forgave himself for that. He'd had more important things on his mind at the time.

For five glorious years he moved on from his past, and for once he didn't have to worry about the future. He lived each day in the present, until that day when he very literally couldn't. Because he had held the objects that time would not let him forget.

…

Harry's last blissfully normal day was in fact not all that serene.

He started around lunch time, equipped with a vengeful hangover, and he proceeded to stumble through the next few hours without enough coffee. He swore he'd give up this ambition to drink a Weasley under the table. At least once a week. But this time was definitely the last.

A little while, and a niggling feeling later, he realised that he'd misplaced his best friend, and he may have insulted his missing-best-friend's wife. Ron and Hermione would forgive him.

"It won't happened again," he declared solemnly.

Hermione shot him an unimpressed look that bordered on amusement if viewed from the right angle. "Yes, it will."

He found he had to agree. "Sorry," he grinned unashamedly.

Her mouth opened in reply, but that was the moment Harry's vision whited out.

He was in an endless misty landscape. Painful memories of a similar experience with a train station and a dead headmaster were dragged to the fore. Cracking down on the immediate panic, he entertained the notion that he was hallucinating. Such occurrences weren't unheard of when a Weasley Episode got out of hand. He hoped that was the case, but without much conviction.

When a black cloaked figure emerged from the expanse of white mist and addressed him, "Master. Welcome to Interim," he felt a spike of pure and simple dread.

The name of the figure came to him, perhaps due to that instinct all living things possess, before the figure even announced; "I am Death."

"But… I didn't die."

"No," Death agreed. "You were called."

"I– what?"

"Come." The hand that touched his shoulder was oddly human in warmth and appearance. Wrinkles creased the skin, but the grip was steady.

Death looked as Harry would've imagined it, had he been the kind to personify such things – an old man, unremarkable except for his odd dress sense. His cloak was simple and unadorned, draped elegantly around him like a dark toga. Although he held himself slightly stooped, he was still taller than Harry.

Death led Harry to a bench and sat beside him.

Harry knew he should have felt uncomfortable as the silence drew on, but it was not easy to sense such things in that place. "Why am I here?" He eventual asked.

"A philosophical question, or one of logistics?" Death's lips twitched. "No matter, in this case one answer satisfies twice."

A wave of his hand sent the mist before them swirling. Colours bled into it, and Death's words wove it into a narrative.

"Only one being transcends the beginning of time and space as we know it, but others arose in short order. The first native entities include Eternity, Infinity, Oblivion, Phoenix and myself. Then there were Celestials – the beings that mortals revere as gods. Life spread, and here you are."

The mist showed colourful, fluid forms rising out of the darkness, coming together and against each other. They were beautiful and powerful, forces of nature in their own right, only somehow _more_ so.

"One resides over us all: the Living Tribunal. He is the judge of cosmic entities, and ensures that the laws are obeyed. He is Balance. We serve, and we maintain reality, we maintain the Balance, by existing. Under out direct employ, are heralds. They have various purposes. For Galactus they act as seekers, for Eternity they are fates, and my heralds undertake aspects of my role."

Death, was, in fact, going somewhere with this. He rarely said things without meaning, and, annoyingly, they frequently contained several more. "Under your hand, my Hallows were united in the manner they were intended. You conquered your fear and released your attachments, and in doing so mastered my very essence. You are worthy being a Herald of Death."

Harry didn't like the sound of that. "Don't I get a say in this?"

Death smiled blandly. "I have been waiting for you."

"So then this was my fate, all along?" The words tasted bitter.

"You call it fate, I call it time. Same concept, different perspective. Essentially, yes, this was, is and will be inevitable. You are my ambassador for humans. Death has many elements; you need only concern yourself with steadiness. Death is steady in the sense that it is reliable, resolute, and prevailing. And above all, Death always answers the call of life."

"No, I'm done with fate! I played that part, I earned my life and I want it back, damn it. I won't do it!"

"Child, you don't have to do anything. We serve our existence by existing."

…

The next thing he knew, Harry was stark naked. And sitting the middle of a runic pentagram, surrounded by a group of chanting and dancing witches. It was wrong, he thought hysterically, that he could look at this situation and think it was just _typical_.

"My Lord Death," one of the older girls spoke in awe, "My name is Abigail. I summoned you to reap the souls of Elizabeth Proctor from Salem, and–"

Something about those names wrung a bell that sounded like the dulcet tones of Professor Binns. "What year is it?"

The girl blinked,"…1692"

Salem witch trials. He dropped his head into his hands. His breathing sped up, his heart stuttered, and for a time he didn't think at all. He was panicking, he knew in an oddly detached manner.

Awareness was slow in returning. He became mindful of a number of things. Firstly, the world was much too blurry. He didn't have his glasses. Secondly, his grip on his wand was liable to break it. He forced his fingers to relax. The slight movement drew his attention to two other things. A band encircled his finger. It was heavier than the engagement ring he had once worn. The material on his back was silken, almost like liquid; the invisibility cloak wasn't protecting much of anything from view.

If he was to look closer, he was sure that the wood in his hand was not _his_ wand, but _The_ Wand, and the ring had a black stone with the Deathly Hallows insignia etched elegantly into it.

"Death?" The girls didn't know quite what to do. They were milling around him and beginning to make more distressed noises. He gathered that he was supposed to fight for them, kill their enemies.

As if that was going to happen.

When he stood, they shrunk back immediately, taking refuge behind their line of runes. Harry wrapped the cloak around himself properly, effectively protecting his modesty by vanishing from sight. He ignored the startled yells.

He needed to get out of America, back to Britain. Part of him still believed this was a hoax. A ridiculously elaborate one, but still. He needed to be sure, and to be on familiar ground.

…

London was hardly familiar ground.

He took a deep breath. When that didn't do much, he took another. Live in the moment, survive in the now. He fell back onto established tactics.

After several measured breaths, he hadn't calmed, but he'd gotten a grip. He kept things simple. First order of business; he needed some clothes.

Harry didn't feel very good about stealing, but needs must. He had no money. He didn't know what he was doing, or how long he was staying, and he couldn't afford to have transfiguration revert back at an inopportune moment.

"Damn Death," he muttered aloud, as he struggled to pull on the strange, horribly uncomfortable and ill-fitting garments. He shrugged the invisibility cloak on and headed back into town. London. Horses, carts, long gowns, stupid hats, with the dirt-poor littering the streets. Every detail, from the buildings to the sewerage, was alien to the city he knew. "What the hell am I even doing here?"

He glared up at the sky, as if that would accomplish anything. "Just give me so goddamn answers, you bloody bastard!"

"That's no way to address an abstract entity," a low, warbled voice spoke up from nowhere. Harry jumped. A bird cawed, and he turned over his shoulder to see a large crow staring intently at him. Straight through his invisibility cloak.

"I'm going crazy." It would explain so much.

"Going, going, gone," the bird cackled. A talking crow.

Harry pinched himself. He felt the pain, he didn't wake up, so there wasn't much left to do besides wing it. "Um… hi?"

Wide, intelligent dark eyes blinked at him. "I am Archaean."

Oh he _so_ couldn't deal with this. He turned on his heal and briskly walked away.

The flutter of wings and clack of talons followed him down the street. Occasionally, he saw the crow hopping along from the corner of his eye. This game lasted for several minutes before his patience fizzled out. He made it to an empty alley, at least.

"Would you stop following me?" he called, without turning to face it. He was still clinging to the hope that if he ignored it, it would go away.

It gave the bird approximation of a shrug, tilting its head and unfurling its wings slightly. "I feel a bond with you. I have waited, unfulfilled for years, until something lead me here."

Harry scowled, sensing Death's hand. "That didn't happen to be in a breadcrumb trail of carrion, I hope?"

"Ahk, no. It was magic, idiot."

Harry yelped as the crow swiftly launch itself off the rooftop and floated down. He couldn't see much; just a quickly approaching blur of whirling feathers.

The bird landed on his shoulder, with feet surprisingly sharp and a body unexpectedly heavy. "No, get away! What are you? A needy pet?"

It hissed at him, and puffed up primly, "No. On both accounts." It snapped its beak perilously close to his ear. He froze, then his shoulders slumped in surrender.

"Fine, come along, who am I to stop you?" He flung his arms up in the air to illustrate his defeat… and just to be a bit of a prick. He didn't manage to dislodge the bird. Its claws only dug in harder.

"Ow. Um… so are you female or male?" He wouldn't have thought its grip could get much tighter, but at his words it managed to an element of offence into the piecing pressure. "Female it is, then."

She glared down at him, loftily. "I will be your companion."

He cocked an eyebrow and the presumptuousness, "I assume you know who I am?"

"You smell of Death."

Harry scowled. "Fantastic. So are crows and ravens going to start flocking to me, now? Because I feel like making a comment about clichés and something tells me you really wouldn't appreciate it."

"No. You are mine, and mine only."

And that was… oddly comforting. He was lost in a strange time, or alone in his deranged mind. No, either way he was not alone any more, he corrected himself.

He removed the cloak. He was doomed to be inconspicuous, but he'd bet his life that a friendly crow wouldn't attract as much attention as one that appeared to be standing on thin air.

…

"Archaean, you're going to get me arrested," Harry eyed the suspicious, incredulous, and plain out hostile looks directed their way. "Scratch that. You're going to get me _killed_."

Fliers were up by the churches; they displayed witch burnings like prized events. Blame, hatred and hysteria. It had to be the bloody 17th century, didn't it? He couldn't have been dumped in a more peaceful era in muggle and magical relations, no, that would've been _tolerable_.

He was feeling more uneasy by the minute. He couldn't possibly blend in here. His speech, mannerism – everything betrayed him as unfamiliar, and that was all but a crime.

"Why don't you fly ahead. Can you lead me to a magical community?"

She stared him down suspiciously, "You'll follow?"

"I suggested it, didn't I?" She wasn't convinced. He signed. "I've nothing better to do."

…

The wizarding world was much more comforting. It reminded him of the Britain he'd left. Most of the shops were different, but those that had endured, like Ollivanders, were far less rundown.

Diagon Alley was even more old-fashioned and far less crowded, but at the same time, the atmosphere was more progressive. Shopkeepers flaunted new innovations, he saw fliers bragging about new spells, exploratory potions techniques. Evidently, the age of science and enlightenment had not passed over the magical population. In all, it was less stagnant than the time he'd grown up in. It really wasn't all that bad.

The people, though, he was feeling less charitable about. In this political climate, anyone even vaguely associated with muggles risked being completely outcast. So the Alley was perfectly lovely, but it didn't want to share it with him.

He was vulnerable and someone was bound to notice, if they cared to. He just hoped that he had the Hallows from _his_ time, and that this era's Hallows remained with the doting owners. If the first thing he'd done was inadvertently steal from highly influential families, he was, plainly speaking, utterly screwed.

He needed news and money, but without his inheritance or his job he had neither. It wasn't as if he could just walk into the Potter or Black vaults. To that end, he didn't know if he even could call himself a Potter. Families counted generations from the past, not every potential branch from the future.

As for news, well, there were fliers for the important stuff, like the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy that they were implementing, but newspapers simply didn't exist yet. The common medium for everyday gossip was good connections.

Enough said.

He had none of the things that distinguished people from pavement; no past, no family, no friends, nowhere to go. As long as that was true, he had no way up. He probably couldn't get lower on the food chain if he tried.

"You do have family." Archaean was smart. She knew much more than she should, and she was learning more every hour due to some strange connection neither of them really understood. He was lucky to have her, but sometimes he really hated the options she presented him with.

It was a potentially delicate situation. Meeting his ancestors could go wrong in so many ways.

"What if I change the future?"

"That would _really_ take some effort."

His logical brain persisted, however, "There shouldn't be a Harry Potter here."

"Shouldn't there?" Archaean challenged.

He remembered the patronus, then, and finally sat down to a very confusing session of thinking wherein he stubbornly hashed out the unique rationality of time travel. He hoped that the future he knew would result from whatever he ended up doing here, because in a way, it had already happened.

"Right. Time for some good old misdirecting."

He applied in what passed as the Ministry for a very painful, but faultless, blood test. To his relief, he took away a family name; the thing that mattered.

He didn't know where he could find the Potters, so he put his faith in a family he'd never liked all that much. He apparated to Grimmauld Place, tried not to cringe, and knocked.

The moment his hand left the wood, a butler opened the door. He was let inside, and the interior was so different he barely had to pretend he didn't know the way to the study. A middle aged man with regal bearing and a painful resemblance to Tonks received him. Harry bowed deeply, though somewhat awkwardly, not knowing quite what to do with his elbows and such. Even Archaean bobbed her head and remained silent.

Lord Marius Black was stern, stuffy and entitled, but he listened. Harry stuck to facts he could prove. His father was a Potter, his paternal grandmother was a Black. He'd never known his father, or his heritage, and his mother died when he was very young. He was a traveller. He'd spent time abroad, learning magic, and he'd come to meet his family.

Black's face was blank, though Harry could tell he was not pleased. In Black's mind, Harry could only be either a bastard, a half-blood, or squib born. Harry knew what conclusion he'd prefer, and that felt like betraying his mother's memory, but he bore the guilt.

Bastards were occasionally expected, but it was bad form: what went on with a missus was not supposed to have consequences. But Harry could swear by the name Potter so even if they thought he was a bastard, he was some important person's bastard. That was dangerous. The risk of his existence required a response of equal magnitude; nothing less that total endorsement or exile.

They might decide that it would be better if he just disappeared.

He rather hoped not.

"I must conference with my extended family, and the Potters." Harry didn't miss that he was pointedly excluded from this. "Monty! See this young man to the dining room."

Harry followed the house elf and met the Black matriarch, Lucretia. She somehow managed to insert criticism on his posture and upbringing, and probe for details all while making polite conversation and smiling enchantingly.

Desperation proved to be a decent suppressor of Harry's temper, but Archaean got bored. Harry thought they were done for. To his surprise Lucretia completely overlooked the comment about the pig and the caterpillar; her frostiness actually lessened by a few degrees. "A powerful familiar reflects well on a powerful wizard. Ravens are intelligent beasts."

Archaean twitched. "Crow."

That was progress, but not enough. Harry was still getting hostile vibes. If Lucretia was aiming to gather information, well, he needed to give it to her, and give it well. She would be his liaison to Lord Black, and her opinion would colour him greatly. Renewed by their small progress, he used some of Hermione's favourite big words, he drew on everything he could remember about exotic cultures, he described the foreign spells he'd learned in the auror corps, and when Lady Black hinted about the Black line hereditary abilities, he took that as a blessing. He played the parseltongue card. The snakes in the tapestries and embroidery perked up, clamouring eagerly towards him. _That_ caught her attention.

Long after being wrung dry by courteous interrogation, Lord Black returned with Lord William Potter. Harry spotted his own eyebrows and nose on the older stranger's face. Potter took one glance at him, and pronounced; "He certainly looks the part, Master Black. Perhaps one of the disowned lineages managed to produce a magical heir. It has been known to happen."

"Both my parents were magical, I do know that much," Harry said quickly. He'd made a passably good impression, he wouldn't lose it.

Lucretia was a great help. "He had the officials test his blood when he discovered an affinity for parseltongue," she supplied nonchalantly, "You can trace the main Potter line back to the Peverells, wasn't it?"

Lord Black displayed some surprise, at that. "He must have good blood from our family. It has been several decades since parseltongue has resurfaced in our line."

Unexpectedly, the ice queen smiled slyly, "In any case… my, my, what _has_ your House been up to William, dear?"

"Merlin only knows. At times I wonder whether my brother will form a House of his own." Harry was surprised to see Lord Potter grin ruefully. So humour _had_ been invented. He was beginning to wonder.

…

Lord Potter challenged Harry to a duel to test his skills, supporting the traveller's belief that in the past they really did use duels to solve everything. To Harry's eyes, the world was a blur, but it was a manageable one. Debris would've been the main concern, but the room they fought in was wide and clear. He could see the other Potter, and he could certainly see the glow from his spells. He made do.

William was good, incredibly so. But Harry, until recently, had done this for a living, and he'd been _the best_. Even Lucretia admitted the he was powerful, though perhaps not fit to be seen in public.

They would teach him, it was decided, and if he could learn to fit in the public eye, he could carry the Potter name. He was adopted him on a preliminary basis, on the conditions that he never claim inheritance over William's sons, and he defer to Lord Potter or Lord Black on all matters. They had power over his life, from housing to marriage, and his successes would be theirs. But Harry had shelter, food and clothes. It was more than enough.

…

Over the next few months, Harry came to terms with the fact that the past was _weird_.

For one, Marius Black had an absolutely wicked sense of humour. It snuck up on victims when they were least expecting it and left them spluttering long after it had passed. He was oddly likeable.

Lucretia, however, was an evil taskmaster. Harry sat with her every day of the week, and she wrestled manners into his posture and shoved a strange way of speaking down his throat. She dragged him up to her standards and held him to them.

When he met William's best friend, well… he wasn't expecting it to be Julius Malfoy, who was as pompous as the ferret he knew, and almost as aggravating. Those two were nigh inseparable.

Soon after, he met Potter's eldest son, Rowland; a fanatic follower of the new emerging sport, Quidditch. Needless to say, they got along. Rowland had three younger sisters, all still in Hogwarts. To his surprise, Harry also liked the Black children. All five of them.

It wasn't that they were different from the stuffy pure-bloods he'd met in his time. These people acted like royalty because they basically were, and had the egos to go with it. Much of the time they were insufferable, but in a way that was endearing once he took the time to know them.

It made him uncomfortable, at first, to discover that of the inseparable duo, his own ancestor hated muggles far more passionately than Malfoy. Malfoy valued the privileges of their social circles, but William saw no saving graces at all.

Harry questioned William about this only once. Malfoy explained, very coldly, that William had watched his baby sister dragged through the street, after a neighbour gave baseless accusations out of jealousy. She was killed, not by the fire, but by a farmer who carved her head in with a shovel while their parents attempted a rescue. People had cheered.

Sensing more to the tale, Harry ventured hesitantly; "What happened?"

William watch from the doorway, face shadowed and eyes dark. "I hunted down those responsible."

"Good," Harry replied without pause. What could William have done? What the muggles had done was condoned, not a crime. No jails would take them, but it didn't feel right to just let them walk away. In the future, sure, he didn't think killing people was the answer, but all that stuff about being the better men, that idealism… it didn't hold up to reality of _now_.

Unlike in the 80s, the hatred was justified. He felt the stirrings himself. He could even understand why this society would hold a collective grudge for the next 300 years. Wizards aged slowly, and forgave even slower.

…

Harry became a well credited spell researcher. Playing with magic in the basement of Potter Manor made him feel closer to the future, to his best friends and his old co-workers, however briefly. But he was getting antsy. It'd been a year. He missed his friends. He mourned well-made glasses and treacle tarts and bad music. And his life showed no sign of changing.

He'd been determined not to jump through Death's hoops, but he was just about ready to give in. "What am I supposed to do, Archaean?"

"Death said you didn't have to do anything."

"But surely there's something! Some girls summoned Death and he sent me. Am I meant to stop them? The muggle conflict is only going to get worse once the events in Salem kick off."

"Maybe you are here because that is all the timeline needs to progress to the future. You don't have to aim for a goal, just live."

Live. Right. "I half blew myself up last week." Harry was beginning to doubt that he could die if he tried.

"I told you to hide the powder before you tried that spell."

…

Years passed. Harry watched Diagon Alley turn into a well-established central hub of activity.

The Ministry as he knew it formed its foundations, aiming to reinforce the Stature of Secrecy legislation to ensure that the witch burnings could never happen again.

Wizards still lived hidden amongst muggles, but communities were coming together as magical people drifted apart from the other, harsher world. It became fashionable to have no contact whatsoever.

The Blacks didn't even consider moving. The house had been built by the first Blacks half a millennia ago. They were above fashion, Marius informed his family pretentiously.

After the pronouncement, Harry scoured the Potter, Black and Malfoy libraries and he devilled into warding. He worked with Marius on Grimmauld place, over the years building up the infamous fortifications.

Paranoia, Sirius had called it. Granted. They went a little overboard. But they would be safe.

It was that way for nine years. He was successful and content. He had a family – it wasn't the one he'd imagined, but they cared for him and he for them.

So of course it couldn't last.

…

The next jump landed him in 1879. He was woken in the middle of the night, skipped the ghostly purgatory, and got dropped into the middle of a sacrificial summoning circle with only Archaean on his shoulder and the Hallows with his person.

He got out of there, quick smart.

Europe was chaos; wars were brewing, so he didn't stick around. He'd just gotten his feet under him, only to have the ground unexpectedly torn away again. Harry didn't dare repeat that for a while.

Harry and Archaean stay in that time for a year before another summoning pulled him into 1951 and, after five years, backwards into1910.

He actively tried to stop it. He imagined, sometimes, getting to the 70's and defeating Voldemort, fixing his life before it could go wrong, or better yet, catching up with the early 21st century and staying there. He wanted to be ready, if that happened, so he dedicated his time to learning. He moved around, from Australia to Haiti, and exchanged knowledge with the shamans.

Some years, he learnt magic, but other times he integrated with muggles. He studied their mythology, and soon became an expert on everything about personifications of Death. Roman, Greek, Norse, Christian, Hindu – nothing helped him much.

What wasn't rubbish, seemed bizarrely like his memories. He found traces of himself in old stories. Ones he'd read _before_ this whole mess, but had not recognised back then.

…

He was woken by an insistent tug moments before the world was spinning away. As was his custom, after negligently stunning the sinister figures who'd summoned death, Harry apparated to London.

It was different.

Phones were bigger, flatter, and absolutely everywhere. The cars were sleeker, the fashion slightly scary, the buildings a little taller. It hadn't been so hard to find a newspaper since the seventeenth century. They said it was October, 2018.

Ron and Hermione weren't living in the flat they'd proudly bought together in 1998. After traumatising and profusely apologising to the old lady who did, Harry tried the Burrow. He scared the old lady there, too. Mrs Weasley hit him with a frying pan, hugged him half to death and scolded him for worrying her.

They called a whole Weasley congregation. From their view, he'd vanished, and now sixteen years later, just as miraculously reappeared. The air was charged with the hurt and blame of his disappearance – the questions had festered for years, and now that he was back, alive all along, they were asking _why_.

"Why did you stay away?" It felt like an accusation.

"Well…" It wasn't a short story, and he wasn't very good at telling it, but over the course of the evening his audience progressed from confused to disbelieving, straight on through to stubbornly determined.

"If I can't stop it, I'm going to jump again."

Hermione tackled the problem by sinking her teeth into some books, and Ron proposed a drink. Some things never changed.

Other things had. His best friends were married, they'd had _kids_. So had Bill and Fleur, George and Angelina, and almost everyone else he knew. He'd met Victoire that afternoon, and he couldn't wait until the Hogwarts term finished.

He did the math, he came up with a glaring irregularity.

"Where is Teddy?" Harry saw the looks they exchanged, and he knew.

It was a weak heart. Teddy had been born with it. The worst part was that it was completely curable, if they'd caught it early enough, but no one had noticed. The symptoms had been explained away. If his skin was too pale, it was a phase, and as a metamorphmagus it was only to be expected. If Teddy had been less energetic than the other children, he was respectful of his elderly grandma. When he started fainting, they noticed, but by then it was already too late; the healers could only slow the progress and make his last years as comfortable as possible.

Harry mourned for how time had moved on without him, and for his Godson, so far beyond his reach.

…

Ron and Hermione were as relieved to see him as he was them, but they had the weight of a decade and a half of vastly different experience between them. It became apparent that Harry couldn't just settle back into his niche; it'd long ago closed up and scarred over. It didn't help that Harry still looked twenty-two, the same as when he'd left.

They tried. Merlin, did they try.

"You have a… raven? You're really playing up the stereotype, mate," Ron goaded with a smile.

Harry blinked. The automatic response that would've come to mind years ago was glaringly absent. "Crow, and yes, it's getting old. We make appearances at summonings every so often and, a few hundred years of repetition later, suddenly we have a pop culture."

Ron's smile turned strained and confused. Harry dropped it, rather than explain.

Hermione bought tickets to a concert not much later. Harry supposed she was worried. He hadn't shown his face outside of the Hogwarts, Black or Ministry libraries since he'd arrived.

Harry took the ticket reluctantly, and read the gaudy, 70s style writing. "Star-lord?"

"Yes, Peter Quill. Muggles call him the Guardian of Good Music. For good reason, too. You can be grateful you missed what the technology revolution did to music in the last decade!" She shuddered theatrically, and then almost immediately clapped he hands to her mouth with more honest horror. "Oh, I'm sorry, Harry."

His smile hurt, just a little. "Don't worry about it."

…

"You should've told me you still needed glasses! I thought you'd had them corrected."

Harry looked at Hermione incredulously. "When would I've done that? Muggles didn't have laser surgery in the 1900s. Even wizards didn't have good glasses until recently. I suppose I just got used to it."

Muggle doctors did their science thing, and he wound up seeing the world more clearly than he ever had. Merlin, he'd forgotten how detailed it all was. It was almost beautiful.

…

Harry's hopes faded. He'd been buoyed up, relieved by the knowledge that Hermione was there, helping him. Answers had always tended to fall into place under her ministrations.

But not this time. There was no pattern to the jumps, and no hint of how to stop them.

What Harry remembered, and what Hermione remembered of their childhood, showed almost no disparities – Harry hadn't changed time. They recalled the same legends about grim reapers, mythology, whatever. Harry could add a few more details and point out where the authors exercised creative licence, but the stories themselves hadn't changed. Harry was embedded in history. It seemed as if he'd always been there.

Hermione had said, once, that terrible things happened to wizards who meddled with time. As they learnt together, more became clear.

"The universe compensates. There is some fundamental understanding that you cannot kill your grandfather; no matter how hard you try, you will always miss or experience an unfortunate accident. People can't erase themselves before they've travelled back in time, but they can die while travelling. Paradoxes can't exist, so they won't. Existence protects itself. That must be what usually kills people, and I think it's also why you're stuck."

Harry thinks about that. He decides, ruefully, that they might've missed the mark with the 'power he knows not'. Someone had to survive Voldemort, grow up, have the Hallows fall into his lap, and make history.

Prophecy wasn't complicated at all, he realised bitterly. The universe was an open book; one just needed the memo. He remembered, then, what Death had revealed. Fate and time are the same concept viewed from different perspective.

He never stood a chance. He, plainly, couldn't arrange things to never become the Master of Death. It had happened, and it always would.

It was beginning to sound inescapable. "We just need more time," Hermione stubbornly repeated whenever she saw his optimism flagging.

Harry had been there for six years. Most of his visits didn't last that long. He didn't expect to be around much longer. "I won't stay away forever," he replied each time.

...

 **A/N: I wrote about 50 000 words of this in 2014, but I didn't like the direction it went after the third chapter, so I scrapped most of it and haven't continued. And yet, I quite like the beginning and the terribly complicated ideas that sit behind it.**

 **Although there is no end in sight, I decided to post it, and I hope that any questions you ask might spark something and help me pick a direction for this story.**

 **I know it's not the story you guys want me to write. I'm still working on that one.**


	2. Constant

_Definition: constant_

 _(Adjective) ever present_

 _always present and available; remaining the same over a period of time._

 _(Adjective) happening or done repeatedly_

 _occurring or made again and again_

 _(Noun) something unchanging_

 _an object, quality, or fact that is invariable or ever present; quantity with fixed value or unvarying property_

…

Harry jumped and time ebbed and flowed around him. He grew to accept that he was doomed to hopscotch through space-time for eternity. It wasn't all bad, so he made the most of it. He enjoyed living, even though it bruised him each time he was torn away, sometimes to return after having aged decades only to find he was the wrong shape to fit back into the life he'd made before.

He saw history unfold because although Death was never welcome, it was often called. It was not a surprise, then, that he spent most of his time around periods of strife or strong religious fervour. He would jump forward until around 2070, then loop back, usually to the 1300s, before going forward again, randomly landing in each century at least once. Rinse, repeat.

He rarely went past 2100. His only visit to 2231, he's pretty sure, was an accident. People had become a more rational species, and most no longer believed that Death was something that could be summoned, or if they did, the practice had long been lost. He took the opportunity to gather another perspective; scientists had figured out time travel by then. Unfortunately, science had moved on so phenomenally since the 21st century that he spent five years in the basic courses before he even understood the trivial stuff, like Hawking radiation. If a solution was there, he never knew – time moved him on.

That was the first moment he couldn't decide whether to laugh or fling green light at things until he felt better, but it wasn't the last.

Once, he woke after celebrating the end of a war in Athens, having lost about thirty-six hours of memory to an obvious cause. Archaean informed him that he'd bestowed the Hallows on three brothers. At the time he was so hammered he couldn't stand without propping himself up with a stick, so it was no surprise he'd considered walking across a bridge so remarkable. At that blood alcohol level, the gift of mobility must've seemed _hilarious_.

The Hallows turned up again the next day. Somehow. _While_ two out of three started playing hot potato with the human race. He didn't understand the mechanics of it, but in the end he didn't need to, because magic has always taken things such as the laws of physics and common sense to be trivialities, and it wasn't going to make an exception for him.

Sometimes he wished it would, however.

He tried to warn Andromeda about the condition Teddy would develop. He wrote notes, he informed people in person, he charmed and blackmailed healers into making a standing appointment. They never caught it in time.

Influence? What a laughable idea. If there was anything Harry came to realise, it was that influence was an illusion. On dark days, he would go so far as to say _free will_ was an illusion, after all, what use is the ability to pick and choose for puppets on some preordained path? A concession. A platitude. A small torture.

In the timeline, Teddy died. No matter what events led up that even, the outcome was death.

Harry knew this. It almost stopped him from trying. But he wasn't the kind to submit to impossible odds or give into despair, and age had not changed that much. He couldn't say, but he could visit. Every once in a while, Harry returned to that brief window of time and he got to know his Godson, a few years at a time.

The timeline was constant in both directions. He was the fluid one, popping up the way he did. And yet, Harry never ran into another version of himself. By the time he realised that oddity, he'd visited most decades, and some of his trips had overlapped. There _should_ have been at least one Harry, at different ages, in just about every moment of human civilisation.

 _Simultaneously_.

What's more, he could imagine a time when he aged, completed more ever more loops, until there was an infinite number of Harrys in any given time.

That boggled his mind, but there were two Harrys in the original 1993 when he rescued Sirius, so the same concept should hold true. Except it didn't. He remembered exactly where he was on the 17th of June, 1910, when he was 37 years old. By the time he'd experienced over 300 years, he looked and he didn't find. There was no 37 year old Harry Potter anywhere.

He was _so_ confused.

…

Then, one time, it was different.

Harry appeared in an ancient war room. Nothing unusual. In his experience, quite a few leaders believed that enacting a summoning ritual for Death sent a good message to the troops. Something bothered him, however, it took him a moment before he identified it.

These people hadn't summoned him. They argued so fervently that no one even noticed his arrival.

"Unhand it! Now! I will endure no more of this insubordination!"

Three older, grizzled men stood around a small blue cube emitting some kind of glow. It accented their angry snarls. The speaker was white haired, but far from frail, in finely crafted golden armour. His grip tightened around a forked spear.

"Obey, Dagr. There are no warnings on this matter," the second, a warrior, pointedly lay a hand on his sword.

"You risk us all. We cannot keep the Tesseract here, let me place it in the Vanaheim vaults."

"No! This is my final word on the matter," the sparkly one declared.

Dagr bowed shallowly and swooped out.

The leader watched him go. "He has had too much contact with it, Tyr. The power has touched his mind. I fear what he will attempt."

"So you will move it?"

"I must. He is not wrong; it is too dangerous to remain in our sight. Prepare your best men. After Dagr acts, deliver the Tesseract to me and announce to all that it has been lost."

"Of course, Allfather." Then they were alone in the room. Harry shifted.

"Death."

Shit. Awkward. Harry crossed the room, into the light, warily.

The Allfather turned to meet him, face impassive despite Harry's sudden, bare arsed presence in what appeared to be a highly confidential meeting. Then an eyebrow rose. "Ah, merely one of his Heralds, and a Midguardian at that. I was expecting your master." His face fell into weariness, the kind that only comes from experience and suffering, "Death always follows the infinity stones."

That means exactly nothing to him. "Where am I?"

"Asgard."

…

The Allfather, Odin, was kept busy with the heightened tension in his court. Asgard was the place of his power, the seat of the Nine Realms. These Realms, this _galactic scale empire_ was only one of many, and just so happened to include the little backwater world called Earth. Harry felt very small, all of a sudden.

Odin would escort Harry back to 'Midguard' within the week, which was a strange errand for an emperor to run, but it wasn't Harry's call. In the meantime, there was a banquet held in his honour. Harry suspected that such a thing wasn't uncommon; the Asgardians seem like the kind to take any excuse to make noise and get smashed.

Most of them, if they deign to acknowledge him, did so only to satisfy the lowest levels of curiosity. He got the impression that they weren't deliberately snubbing him, which almost certainly would have been the case if more of them recognised him as a mere Midguardian. But as it was, the backbone of their society was entirely built on simple principle values: physical strength, direct confrontation and a high kill count.

Harry approached 6 foot from the wrong end of the scale and at best he could be described as lithe. He was strong in his own right, but around the Asgardians he felt dwarfed by muscles and liable to break if they got too affectionate. He carried no steel, and although he had a healthy appreciation for fighting things, he did it at a distance. By way of a wand. To the warriors, that was like extreme knitting.

Crows, though, turned out to be slightly revered. They treated Archaean with respect and attention, but as they craned their necks down to meet Harry's eyes, they habitually concluded that he could never amount to much.

He felt like a snake in the lions' den, even more than he'd even been in Gryffindor.

On the upside, he was largely left to his own devices. After the first few hours, when it became apparent that he wouldn't be missed, Harry set off to peruse the library – it seemed like the kind of place that might contain an explanation to his ongoing problem.

If only he could read the language.

He flicked, frustrated, through the delicate tomes, partly thankful that the Asgardians were keen on picture books, but for the most part all he found was frustration as he got tantalising glimpses of things that _might_ be answers.

He stumbled through a record of Asgardians that were legendary in their own right and he paused. He recognised Hel. Previously, he'd assumed Hel to be another one of his various appearances in mythology and religion. It was a sore point with him, as Hel was always portrayed as a woman. If Harry had to suffer the indignity of time travelling naked, he'd liked to think that one thing, at least, would be _obvious_.

On Earth, representations of her seem to have been influenced by the more traditional grim reaper, but in Asgard things hadn't been filtered through time and mortal minds, and it became clear that she was a totally different representation of Death.

Once he got over his relief, the wider implications excited him.

He asked (begged) a darkhaired boy to assist him. The child was, mercifully, much more subdued than the party goers, and helped him through the passage with a resolve Harry hadn't seen since Hermione and with intelligence beyond all bar Luna. The combined traits were staggering, especially because the child basked in Harry's attention with slight awe. It was nice, Harry knew from experience, to feel needed.

When they finished, the boy hesitated to leave. Grinning slightly, Harry returned the favour. He started with a story, not of big warriors being brave, because Harry was sure the kid had heard plenty of those, but of a skinny average person that had been pushed under the stairs, but grew into a world of magic.

Harry wasn't surprised when the embellished tale got derailed, and they ended up debating theoretical applications of transfiguration instead.

…

Before leaving, Harry persuaded Odin to visit Helheim.

The Lady of the Realm was a striking woman. He felt the similarities immediately. Her headdress exuded a power much like his Hallows, and there was a giant dog that seemed oddly intent at staying by her side.

She greeted him as a fellow Herald, and he almost collapsed with relief.

Archaean and Garm got along splendidly. As strange as it is to see a crow and a giant hound playing together, Harry decided it was nice to know that he wasn't the only with an unavoidable animal companion.

Hel had never met another Herald, though she was aware that there were many more. She had more experience and knowledge than Harry. She told him about their boss, the rules that governed them. Or the rules that governed her, specifically; Death is not selective. It claims all – the old, the young, the worthy, the disgraced. It is indiscriminate. That is Hel's element. She was not, and never had been, stuck in a time loop. Their roles are different; they represented different aspects of Death, so she could offer him some answers, but not a solution.

"Deaths bows to time, to Eternity. We, too, are bound by it. Death answers the call of life, and so you must answer the call to preserve time as it is."

…

Odin hid the Tesseract on Earth in 1476, but never mind that, Harry was _delighted_. He apparated to Italy after a farewell that was probably too brief to be strictly polite and he may just have irritated an all-powerful being in his haste (but it would hardly be the first time).

He'd been in 1472 recently enough to prevent old friendships becoming awkward, and in that year he'd met a delightful young genius that he could never spend too much time with.

Harry knocked impatiently and there was a muffled curse from a voice he didn't recognise. Harry remembered enough Italian to recognise a creative mix of threats and bribes not to open the door.

It opened. There was paint on his fingers, a brush in his hand, and the face Harry saw was no different from the one he remembered, save for the devilish tilt to the other man's grin.

"Da Vinci, what _have_ you gotten up to since I've been gone?" Harry stumbled over the language for a moment.

Leonardo took no note of his questionable pronunciation and pulled him into a hug, "Harry, Archaean, it is fantastic to see you both!"

The young man blinked, taking in the Asgardian garb Harry was still decked out in. "Where have you been?"

"Eh, abroad," he rubbed his neck sheepishly, pulling at the tight collar.

Leonardo brushed the mater aside. Harry did not assume for a moment that he was off the hook. Da Vinci had a mind like a trap and more than enough curiosity to bait it: doubtlessly, the questions would be thoroughly examined when he wasn't quite so excited.

"Come in, come in, there is someone you must meet!"

Harry was happily dragged into the inventor's office. It was cluttered, as always, and Archaean immediately went off to examine da Vinic's latest flying model. Honestly, you get those two started on aerodynamics…

Beneath the window was an easel and a model. At first, Harry mistook him for a girl, but the man was dressed in a dark woman's gown and makeup, so Harry figured he could be forgiven.

The man let out an enraged hiss and more scathing words were sure to follow, but Leonardo interrupted with frightening intensity. "No, strike your pose." Once his workplace was once again under control, he introduced them.

"Harry, this is a good friend of mine, Ezio Auditore da Firenze. Ezio, this is Harry Potter, the traveller."

They assessed each other and came away satisfied. Ezio's hostility lifted slightly, probably because Harry managed to maintain a straight face.

"For the record, this is entirely _his_ fault," Ezio gestured to da Vinci with a glare.

"Ah, this is the least you could do. You'll save me a lot of trouble. Now smile."

Ezio's smile promised pain, but Leonardo was a good artist – he softened that out quite nicely.

"We will never speak of this again," Ezio declared darkly, hours later, once he had shucked the dress.

Leonardo sniffed. "Just for that, I am going to turn it into a masterpiece someday."

…

The next time Harry was in twentieth century France, he visited the Louvre. He stood before the Mona Lisa and the likeness of a young man who grew to be the most infamous assassin that history forgot. In drag.

He saw Ezio's familiar features, made to look feminine, and cackled until the guards escorted him out.

…

Harry moved around. Each time he skipped, he'd settle down where the excitement was happening, so as not the get bored. He tended to stick to England because the dialects were usually close enough to English for him to understand. He soon picked up a fair bit of Italian, Latin, and several other languages by necessity, and then his eyes really opened.

He watched people build the Eifel Tower, the Sydney Opera House, the Hoover Dam. He was there when the Romans reached Britain. He pranked Augustus, because that was something even the Weasley twins couldn't boast, and he was a little bitter about the legionnaire who once stuck a sword through him around 400 AD.

He was with the Egyptians when they build the pyramids. Watching the sorcerers weaving a blanket of magical protections and giving the curses an infantile sentience of their own was breathtaking _._ Bill would have loved to see it, and that thought gave him an idea.

Harry couldn't take anything with him, but magic could preserve things for centuries. Harry had never skipped more than that far ahead.

For the next loop, he filled books with anything and everything. A newspaper clipping of the one time the Cannons actually won the league. A feather from a Snidget for Luna. Many obscure and forgotten spells that Hermione, Bill and the Twins would appreciate. Every few weeks he deposited them in a certain location and refreshed his preservation charms. Whenever he jumped, they were still there. It gave him something to do, and something to look forward to.

Once he caught up to 1500, he showed da Vinic building plans from impossible structures and they fawned over them together. In 1703 he gave Marius Black the schematics for even more powerful wards. More years pass, more knowledge was preserved and shared.

He made it to 1945.

…

He was eating when the distinctly unsettling feeling came over him. Harry paused, pasta dangling from his fork, trying to pinpoint the sudden change.

The room disappeared from view and travelling was sensation he was used to, but this time it jarred him. He couldn't put his finger on it, but something was definitely off.

He found himself in a large room on a plane, wherein the two other beings were intently focused on a familiar blue cube. The Tesseract was in the hand of a red man, and it was active in a way that Harry had never seen before. Phenomenal power pooled in the roof of the plane until some threshold was passed – magic snapped, and the it displayed the galaxies and stars of some unknown corner of the universe.

It was no illusion, but a rift. The vacuum immediately depressurised the cabin, and in some corner of his mind Harry was relieved that enough air was flowing in through holes in the fuselage to prevent everything from immediately being sucked into space. The part of his brain delirious from lack of breath was responsible for that; the air was so thin that it felt like it was being sucked from his lungs, there wasn't enough oxygen going to his brain, he couldn't _think_ –

The Tesseract energy sucked the red guy up and deposited him who knows where, before the uncontrolled portal collapsed and it was all Harry could do to weather the storm. He heard an outraged squawk, and he gasped a response, but he couldn't see Archaean anywhere. Everything was moving too fast.

The other man, in blue and white, was up in an instant, before Harry even think about catching his breath. He dropping into a fighting stance and threw a shield at him; it was spinning, hypnotising ––

It was so unbelievably cold. The icy daggers sliced into his bones and grabbed hold. They reached his mind and pulled him into darkness.

…

 **A/N: So… yeah, this is the end of The Beginning. The prelude really, the story starts now. Coincidently, we've also reached the point where I don't know what I'm doing.**

 **Also, I apologise for being mean (but not really), I'm not going to mix all of Assassin's Creed in here as well, that little cameo was just my bad sense of humour getting away from me.**

 **Yes, I 'do science'. I have a reasonable understanding of quantum theory and relativity. If you have any questions that I can explain, I will try. No, I will not do your homework.**

 **Anyway, I'm curious: what Marvel characters do you want to see feature prominently? Hero, antiheros, villains? All past and future Marvel films are open.**


	3. Transcend

_Definition: Transcend (Verb)_

 _1\. go beyond limit_

 _to go beyond a limit or range, e.g. of thought or belief_

 _2\. surpass something_

 _in quality or achievement_

 _3\. be independent of world_

 _to exist above and apart_

…

Harry was vaguely aware of sensations – voices, pressure, pain, and burning cold, _cold_ , **_cold…_** until, to his relief, he was suddenly in a place where he could feel nothing but the soft air on his skin and the fog clearing from his head.

Interim was the same as always, Harry decided. It'd been a while since he'd been there. He hadn't died in some time.

Death, though, was smiling when he appeared, and _that_ was as unusual as it was disturbing. It wasn't a gentle smile; no, there was something sharp about that glee.

"I admit, I had hoped this would happen. It was never a certainty," Death murmured.

Harry paced warily. " _What_ happened, exactly? I remember being knocked out…"

"The plane crashed. It sunk into the ocean and froze, your body along with it. For sixty-seven of years, you were in that ice."

Harry's breath caught in his chest. He usually traversed millennia in that amount of time. "Bloody hell. Would you care to tell me, exactly, why my misfortune has you so chipper?"

"A pocket of time," Death mused, suddenly grinning scarily. "Time moves regardless of opinion or effort, moving forward from Order to Chaos, from energy to heat. But it is not linear; sometimes going forwards entails a loop into the temporal past. It adjusts to correct itself using you, though me. You go back to where ever you are required, to keep the future as you know it."

Harry was not impressed. "I realised. On my own. You know, all those years where you just threw me to the wolves." Well, more or less. He had suspected something similar, at least.

Harry got the impression Death was rolling his eyes, though the being's expression didn't flicker. "If time is a river, you can drop a boulder, but it will be worn down until the flow is amended, because you, the river's embankments, are infallible. We maintain the universe as it is by bowing to our nature; we serve our existence by existing."

Harry was uneasy. The explanations, the fanfare – Death was never so chatty, it was almost as if he was gloating.

"What an unfortunate loophole." And that sarcasm, there, was _definitely_ triumphant. "You were dead in all the ways that physically matter, but as my herald you cannot truly pass on. To go beyond Death is to go beyond Eternity; we are inexorably linked. You froze in a pocket of time, and time moved on without you. The river burst its banks. For seventy years. Forever. Certainly, long enough to carve _new_ channels."

Harry couldn't breathe.

"Causality was broken: Fate holds no power, Eternity has been dealt a mighty blow. The universal balance collapsed," Death said as if that was a _good_ thing.

Well shit, Harry thought, but the sensations were pouring back and the mist was fading. The last impression Harry got was of Death's toothy smile as he said; "I look forward to change. Finally, things will be more interesting."

…

It was so cold. There was heaviness in his lungs. His arms wouldn't move. Magic was working hard to reverse the damage, to the point where it exhausted him more than he could handle. He drifted.

A zip split the world open and the light flooded in, burning him, leaving him mostly blind. He couldn't have blinked if he'd tried.

"No sir, I've never seen him before." The voice reminded him of frisbees, and he couldn't for the life of him figure out why. Harry recognised that tone, so he knew the man, but the man didn't know him. The dichotomy of information got his attention; no one _forgot_ him.

"He was in the main cabin with you, slightly behind and above." Another man, this one a stranger.

"The ship was empty; the Red Skull was the last on board. Maybe your man was an explorer that came along later?"

"So we would assume. We've dated the corpse: the state of tissue damage puts his death at around fifty years ago. But he drowned. And this is the state we found him in – one thin cloak, one ring, no other belongings."

The darkness closed in one click at a time. Ah, body bag. He recognised it now, and he wanted to groan; those were a _nightmare_ to open from the inside. But the darkness was nice.

His mind wavered, the conversation moved beyond his capacity to listen. An indeterminable amount of time later, a hand settled on his torso. It was gentle, barely there, but his chest was having enough trouble rising under its own weight so he definitely noticed the addition of more.

The light returned, the noise escalated beyond reasonable levels, Harry's arm was wrenched, a hand squeezed his wrist. His muscles screamed at the movement, he wanted to slap the bastard.

"Get me a doctor."

Oh, bugger it.

The tell-tale tug came, for once at an opportune moment, but on top of everything else that was too much pain for anyone to reasonably manage. He dropped into unconsciousness.

…

However uncomfortable that shelf and bag had been, it was feathers and rose petals compared to collapsing on his back in the sand. Harry's mouth froze open in a silent scream, the air wouldn't leave.

"Death, I am you humble servant!"

He blinked, and his eyelids scrapped over what felt like gravel. No wonder he couldn't see. His chest rose and fell and air rattled around in a few pitiful moans that sounded a lot like " _Fuck_ " and " _You_ ".

He ignored the sycophant, his attention fell on the prone ball of feathers he could feel on his chest. "Archaean."

His hands shook with the effort of holding them aloft, he stroked her gently. Her feathers were bent; that was wrong. She always kept them so neat. Her heart was beating very quickly.

"Hey there, you're ok." His fingers combed through the plumage on her neck, her back. He didn't feel any damage. "You'll be alright," he promised himself.

Tug. Blink.

Harry was deposited on his feet, and he swayed. He had limited resources available for balance, since he was cradling the crow to his chest.

His knees hit the dirt and, yeah, that was going to leave a mark, but it hurt no more than the rest of him.

He bent over her, sheltering the bird from whatever might be around them. There was colour leaking into the light and dark gradient he'd been able to perceive.

"My Lord!"

"Shut up!" he roared.

Magic, yes. Healing. Where was the wand? His hands were full of feathers, he was reluctant to move. But the wand –

The pull, and then there was noise all around him. A riot, a rally, maybe, there was copious cheering and praying; he put his bet on zealous cult number 34.

His eyes stung and he blinked rapidly – they weren't so dry anymore. The blurs started to form distinguishable shapes.

He shuffled and his feet slipped on the smooth surface. It was slick with something warm and dark. His knees, again. Merlin _why_ the knees? He didn't drop the wand this time, it was nestled up against his companion's wing.

He knew that coppery smell, and suddenly the mysterious pile of beige and brown beside him became startlingly clear. Sacrifices.

The cultists were dancing in blood, praising their cleverness, celebrating the grand accomplishment they'd paid for in unnecessary pain that wasn't even their own.

"Death bows to me, my disciples! We go forth, our enemies will know our might!" A woman swanned around the room, speaking an old French dialect. She had a cruel face.

Harry attracted a certain type of people. The desperate, the clever, the dredges of humanity, the type of crazy a person must be if intentionally seeking out Death personified. The faces change, but it was always the same idiots. They were the kind of people who craved the attention of whatever vengeful and mighty gods they believed in, yet didn't have the nuance to temper that urge with the concern that something grumpy and powerful _might actually answer_.

These guys at least had the forethought to restrain his power, but not for the right reasons – the zealous control freaks were buoyed up on their own narcissism. They lacked fear, and without the paranoia for the minute details, they missed anything that might have given him pause. The Egyptians taught him how to find the smallest hole in the most airtight plan. In all his years, he'd never actually needed to go to that much trouble.

They'd warded against escape, deception, betrayal – and those were just the runes he could see. It was an airtight casing on his skin, almost. So only a _slightly_ higher standard of idiot than usual.

Megalomaniacs were never thorough enough: for one, they never took the time to clean up the blood. They revelled in the power, the ambiance – and forgot that they'd left said power around where anyone could tap into it.

He drew in the fluid, and rune by rune, the restraints fell away. When his magic was free, the idiot was still preaching. Harry turned his wand on Archaeon. "Rennervate."

She twitched, stunned, like the time she'd flown into a window.

"Come on girl, what hurts?" His whispers were drowned out by the feverous chanting. It was getting on his last nerve.

She flopped gracelessly, wings and legs and head moving with little coordination. Worriedly, Harry did what he could for her head and busied himself with patching up her feathers while she regained her faculties.

He knew the moment she did; "Stop that," she bit him. "You're making a mess."

The crow rolled onto her stomach and stood shakily. She hopped to his shoulder, a quiet promise that she'd be fine. Harry's shoulders lightened with relief.

More shouting. Dear Merlin could they not see he was busy? "Death! Death! Death!"

Harry sighed. "If you insist."

He stood – the smoothest motion he'd managed since waking – and spells rained from his lips.

There was more a lot more blood outside of bodies before he was finished and the leader cowered up at him. "This – this isn't what He promised…"

"I'm sorry, were you expecting something else?"

"I – I, but –" Her last words.

He levelled the wand with her eyes. "You asked for death. I'm delivering."

Her body fell, and Harry ignored it. Instead, he spelled the blood off the invisibility cloak, lest it become annoyingly conspicuous, and muttered sourly. "Yeah the service isn't what it used to be. The service got callous after the first century. You may leave your complains with freaky greeting mist."

Apart from his knees, he felt much better. He suddenly wanted to get far from that room. He only got halfway to the door.

Heave. Harry groaned.

A blizzard. No, a battleground. Blue giants and gold Asgardians, having it out in what, to Harry, seemed less like a storm and more like an ice age.

He'd never been so cold. Harry felt his balls roll up and die.

"Death, Hel. Please, take me. No more. If it's not you it's _them_ , please, don't let me fall to them."

It was dark, there was a lot of snow swirling between Harry and the prone man before him, he couldn't tell which side of the battle he might hail from.

Yank.

Warehouse full of idiots, but pleasantly temperate.

Jerk.

Restaurant. Harry looked around, bewildered. Of all the times and places… the main course, seriously?

"Oh, I'll have the lobster carbonara," a dolled up girl ordered without looking away from the man opposite her, staring blindly to eyes that said he'd rather lick an electrical socket than finish the date with this creature.

Archaeon cackled.

Tug.

"I missed something," the crow suspected.

"Apparently we have 70 years of skipping to make up for." Harry thought that made sense, except it didn't and he was pretty sure that wasn't how this herald business worked.

Pull.

This time a car crash; a superstitious man praying for god, magic, _anyone_ to save his hands.

The tug was like a slap.

Enough.

A punch in the gut.

Just stop. Merlin, he wanted to rest.

He didn't think he could take much more.

He wondered what would happen if _he_ prayed for Death. That might throw a wrench into things. He's tempted.

And then he's in hell. A few people were herded like sheep between giant silver robots and there was desolation as far as he could see. Most of them were crying, several of them could hardly move, and as Harry caught his breath, one of them was killed with no more care than an insect. They were dirty and desperate and they prayed for release – the kind of release that one might seek Death for.

It cannot be right.

The robots turned on him and he apparated to London, landing on rocky uneven ground in the same terrible state as the scene he'd left. The air was almost too hot to bear. Scotland was the same. On the other size of the world, Australia was even worse. He landed in the ocean when he tried for Brisbane and something in the water burned like acid. The skyscrapers rose from the waves like broken, worn pylons.

But the architecture was clear; Archaeon was the expert but Harry wasn't thick. They were definitely in the 21st century.

"What. How?"

He hadn't seen a calamity of this scale in any of the years he lived, and in this century he'd visited them all. This _did not happen_.

He pulled himself out of the water onto a grimy surface, mind numb, eyes refusing to see it.

"Focus!" Archaeon croaked; sharp pain radiated from where she bit his ear. There were no answering bird cries. There was nothing at all.

The current changed – not the water, or the air either. It felt deeper than that. He wasn't sure how he knew and for that he'd call it instinct or experience, but something in the channel of time was being _undone_.

It was brief, a small change.

But change was an illusion: that was how the universe worked! It only ran on one path – from order to chaos, endlessly on towards higher entropy. Events were set in stone: what would be would be because it already was.

He'd cracked. Lost his mind, clearly.

Another tug, and he couldn't get away from there fast enough.

The next place certainly wasn't a planet: he landed on a chunk of rock in a belt of similar bits of rock and ice, and he knew he was in space because, despite the inexplicable atmosphere and air, there was a huge gas giant quite like Saturn hanging right over his shoulder, way too close for comfort. But Harry really had other things to concern himself with.

A prisoner, beaten to a bloody pulp, tried to kneel proudly beneath a floating throne. They were surrounded by a small army of cyborgs, armed with spears and blasters that struck at any bit of skin they could find.

Harry tensed, Archaeon froze and hunkered closer to his neck. Harry didn't doubt for a second that he could be next. If they attacked, he would have to take his chances in a fight – he was already cornered, where could he run? Off the side of the rock? Apparate? Oh please, he'd misplaced his _planet;_ there was no way he would reach it under his own power.

He braced for another long moment. But they hadn't even noticed him. He'd not been summoned. (Weird. Had that happened before? He had a funny feeling.) Regardless, he did not want that to change. Cloak. Right. He covered himself in slow, careful movements.

He'd like to skip any second now, please and thank you.

Oh _dear god_ how had he not noticed the giant purplish alien on the throne. Harry could feel the menace radiating off it, his mind frankly rebelled at the idea of stepping closer. Yet the prisoner met the being's eyes with daring and hate. Harry felt a great swell of admiration, and more than that, pity. They were both helpless – to stop this, to escape.

"Silvertongue. Liesmith." A decorated minion mocked the prisoner, its voice strange and deep in the echoless space. "Your pride betrays your dreams, little Prince. You value your knowledge and power, meagre as they are. You crave more, you fear loss. _He_ will grant that to you, and _laugh_ as it tears you apart."

But no, Harry's helplessness was a choice. He would not sit by. If he was captured he'd fucking deal with it; they could not keep him here forever, not while time still moved. He snuck closer, ducked around the jeering aliens and towards the prisoner. Maybe he could grab him, maybe he could… what? _Then_ what? He had no clue, and he could feel Archaeon's glared burning into the side of his head as she tried to silently remind him of this fact.

"You are weak, frost giant. _He_ will break your precious mind." After receiving a gesture, the servant stepped forward with a box, and before Harry could consider acting, it'd forced the prisoner's hand in.

All his limbs – and they were longer than the bony pile led Harry to believe – were suddenly straight and rigid. A horrible low groan was wretched from his throat. Thin fingers clenched until white around a glowing blue crystal.

The minion rolled the prisoner over with a sharp kick, grabbed his pointy chin and dragged his face up to the alien's level. The hand released suddenly, and the man fell like a ragdoll.

"His mind is mostly intact," the minion announced. "He will survive it long enough." Harry wasn't an expert on alien body language, but some things were universal, and that alien was definitely pleased, but it was sort of an angry satisfaction offset by the disappointed that the crystal hadn't reduced the prisoner to a drooling vegetable.

(Harry probably had too much experience with psychopaths.)

"Good," the purple monster rumbled. Harry just about _shat_ himself: to go against such a thing… it was absurd, he couldn't force himself to move, either to run or to fight. "Finally, a useful being in this forsaken system."

The prisoner growled at the description, suddenly all bluster, a totally shift from the stoic indifference of before. "I am a king!" Harry could see that: they beat him, and he did not bow, but that was being stripped from him, somehow.

The servant moved to strike him, but aborted the gesture when the monster just chuckled, like the prisoner was an animal performing a neat trick, as ordered. "Do you have an army, puny king?"

The prisoner shook his head. It looked more like he was trying to shake off a headache than answer.

"I do. I will lend it to you, in exchange for the Tesseract." The monster bared its teeth in amusement, and slouched on its throne, and Harry understood; this creature _owned_ pain, it was power personified; unstoppable, undeniable. Harry took another step forward.

The prisoner appeared to struggled with his tongue. "The Tesseract was lost to Asgard centuries past."

"Do not try to mislead me. I know it has been found. I know where it is. You know where it is, and you _will_ bring it to me."

The monster's eyes narrowed and Harry, by now close behind the prisoner, caught the full force of the concentrated glare. Archaeon shook.

Worse, it got so much worse. The monster's nostrils flared and it sucked in a deep breath, tasting the foreign power in the air. There was _recognition_ in its blue eyes when they snapped open. More terrifying than any of the menace this creature exuded, was the reverence and affection it turned on the exact spot Harry stood.

"Herald. You bring word from your master?"

He might have done it, maybe if things had been different Harry would have talked his way out of it, but the tug kicked in.

Harry desperately wished he could reach out and take the prisoner with him. Instead, he jumped, again and again. A few minutes at a time, he patched together a picture of a world very different to the one he'd lived through. The technology didn't make sense, the human biology alone violated more physical laws than he could count on his fingers – he saw a regular muggle turn his own body to ice – he didn't know where to _begin_ with his objections.

He saw more alien worlds than he cared to remember, but he never forgot about the first – the similarities alone assured that. It was the glowing weaponry – but there gleaming guns and swords and blasters, and then there was _weaponry_. A red mist, a yellow gem, but purple was by far the most popular colour.

Billions of aliens fell to purple light; some of them the very people that had attempted to wield it. He came to think it was the same ball, changing hands over millions of years. He certainly hoped it was one of a kind.

Not long after he came to that conclusion, and discovered a new aversion to all shades of violet, it all became a bit of a blur. There wasn't time to breathe between one scene and the next.

The jumps were speeding up, until he seemed to linger more in the instant between time zones than at his destinations.

For an indeterminable amount of time, he was unconscious. But somehow, he adapted: he became aware of Archaeon's claws in his skin, her weight on his shoulder, he wasn't breathing because he wasn't alive and somehow that was alright. Existing felt completely different – not wrong or uncomfortable compared to how it had always been… but certainly different.

And then he truly opened his eyes to the world for the first time, and it was _breathtaking_.

As he flickered in and out of the normal world, the place in-between changed like a flipbook. Those real flashes shortened all the time, until it he was there and gone so fast he simply couldn't see it; he might as well be living in the place between.

He became aware of a noise, only that was too crude a description – it was the phoenix song. The fire flickered, always just out of the corner of his eye.

The phoenix was just one bright light among many flares. Harry recognised one other, Death, by his grin more than anything. But there were six things that stood out: they were fainter, like echoes, they were not quite there. Purple, red, blue, orange, green, yellow.

The green one felt personal.

An hourglass came to mind, made of clear crystal and set within two spinning silver rings. He wasn't sure if it was his imagination or if it was actually there, or if the distinction even mattered here. It looked like a time turner, it felt like more. Glowing green sand flowed endlessly from one end to the other.

He felt drawn to touch it and it was there, solid beneath his fingertips. The moment he made contact, the sand froze in the glass before it moved, piling over itself in mesmerising patterns and back up through the funnel, against gravity or whatever compelled it, following his finger.

All of a sudden, for an instant, it was like his mind was emptied and the universe shoved in. He felt really, _really_ tall, the universe was laid out bellow him and he could see the farthest reaches, every second that had passed and would ever be.

It was nothing as small as planets and trees and people; he could see it all – galaxies hundreds of lightyears across, nebulae and dust clouds beyond the scope of reason on one side of the scale, and then he turned to see stars and planets and asteroid belts. There was darkness moving off like a shadow that Harry suspected was actually another dimension beside space and time.

But the minute details were still there; he could feel it, just like he could feel every proton, every quark, every secret, and the strings that tied them all together.

It was knowledge, revealed by time. More and more information made itself known, headless of what his mind could take. Harry thought it broke him, just a bit.

It wasn't a lot of time to digest the information, really. An entire universe. It lasted for a moment that felt like eternity.

His mind shut down.

He thought it'd done admirably up to that point.

…

It was the worst hangover of his entire life – no doubt about it. Harry had lost all sensation on the left side of his body. He was deaf in one ear. He might've been missing his toes, who could say.

Oh and he was dead again. Whatever he'd done, it must've been impressive.

"What have you forgotten?"

Harry groaned. "Don't ask mean questions, Death. How the fuck should I know?"

He remembered skipping, faster and faster until he blacked out. Ah, about that. "What's going on?"

Death smiled. "Take a seat. We have time. You fried your brain in an empty corner of the universe."

He'd calmed since their last meeting, now acting much more like his old abstract self, though still more cheerful. Harry was no less wary.

"Do you remember what I told you of the Living Tribunal? The other cosmic entities like myself?" Death brought up from out of the blue.

Harry nodded. "Vaguely."

"Did you ever wonder _how_ we came to predate the universe? How a physical being like Galactus could possibly survive the end of the universe that existed before this one, endure the Big Bang when atoms couldn't even hold onto electrons until 300 000 years of cooling, and still exist today?"

"Of course." He'd just given up when he couldn't make heads or tails of it and decided to call it philosophy.

"You are beginning to understand." Death proclaimed. Harry disagreed. He didn't expect Death to just give him the answers, but it was still infuriating. "Only Eternity remembers it all from the true beginning. There was nothing, and then there was everything. But that universe ended, and the second came to be – as did I, as did the first infinity stone."

"Infinity stone?" He'd heard that a number of times, now, first from Odin. He gathered that it was important.

Death hummed. "Another time, perhaps."

Harry contemplated the futility of vengeance, at length.

Sensing a homicide in the works, the strange being grinned. "The answers are out there, if you want them badly enough."

Harry hadn't been thinking about going back, but the idea repulsed him more than pleading did. "Let me stay, I need rest."

"Your body can sustain you again, off you go."

…

He'd come full circle (had he even left?). He blinked awake, once again (still?) in a body bag. All the pain in his body had migrated to his head (surely that level indicated there was a piece of rebar through it. Would explain why they put him in a body bag.).

A bird pecked at him through the rough mesh. Her presence struck him as different, for some reason. He ignored her. (The past however long felt like a hallucination. There were drugs for that, surely? Coma? He'd accept it. It would explain a lot.).

His scrambled memories weren't clear. Well that was not quite true; he remembered an impression, as if he'd witnessed something more amazing than anything else could even hope to be. Just like any other time he'd been on the good drugs.

But… something about it lingered with him. Just _thinking_ about it sent a surge of power through him, and there was an undercurrent to that, like he'd learnt something despite himself. Something in his mind had been opened; he understood he should be able to control his time jumping, and more than that – he realised he already knew how to resist it. _Intuitively_. Just like that.

" _Fuuuck_ ," he moaned inanely, his voice muffled through the bag and material caught on his lips when they moved but he couldn't care less. "Archaeon, did you slip colourful mushrooms into my stew again?"

"No."

"I was afraid you'd say that," he slurred.

He dozed, exhausted, while the crow picked at the zip above him. A hole appeared right above his eyes and the light was distracting enough to irritate, which was probably the blasted creatures intention. Harry shimmied an arm up and pulled the zip the rest of the way.

"Thanks," he told Archaeon, and almost meant it. Magic was too complicated to be advisable post brain-reconstruction, but he _really_ didn't want to deal with an interrogation once these people realised one of their cadavers was up and walking. Metaphorically. He could stand, at least.

He apparated, and by the end of it he'd lost half his toenails and they were stinging something fierce. He didn't know where or when he was, and couldn't work up the energy to care.

Darkness. He greeted it enthusiastically.


End file.
